EXTRAEXTRA

An Open Letter To The Republican Party From A Young Voter

Ever since your party lost the last election cycle, there has been an abundance of discussion about what you must do win over voters like myself. Predictably, this entire 'dialogue' has amounted to little more than a monologue of cliches, truisms, and outright untruths perpetuated by party consultants who do not, and could not, understand our generation's grievances with your political system. As people who cash six-figure checks by working within that system, they have turned our growing political conscience, a profound disgust with endless war, endless debt, and endless growth in government, into a trite generational grievance, as if the TMZ political agenda of gay marriage and celebrity endorsements was foremost on the minds of the politically-aware members of our generation. If you don't want us to remember you as the people who took a country with a free, productive middle class and sat by as it was transformed into a country of depressed, brainwashed debt slaves, please, take a moment from your busy day and read some thoughts from an actual voter and Millennial, a real person, and not the product of one of your focus groups.

Your consultants advise you that the way to win elections is to try to appeal to us by being a little less of what you appear to be, and a little more like your opponents. A few more token minority faces, a little less strict when reading the Constitution, and you will become some kind of winning compromise brand. What your consultants, professional politicos who are in the personal business of growing government, fail to mention is that, whenever somebody is given the choice between an original product and a lesser imitation, they are always going to choose the original. It's human nature, and common sense. Yet you have operated for decades within the paradigm of a perpetually growing Keynesian state, wherein all crucial sectors of society are dependent on government subsidy, and you never challenged it in principle. You went along with the program, offering only weak caveats within that status quo as an electoral alternative. Now that we have reached the point where the government can't fund itself a year in advance, you want to pin all the blame on President Obama, as if he were a sole nefarious figure operating in isolation, and not the logical culmination of a trend you feebly opposed, nay, emulated, every single step of the way.

When there was true opposition, as there was in the person of Ron Paul, you criticized him as outside of the mainstream, which belies your true allegiance — to the mainstream of governance which you claim to oppose, yet seek to join with every weak electoral attempt to appeal to the youth. On your talk shows and media channels, you bemoan your marginalization in major media and academic circles, and yet see the solution to all your problems in appealing to the very forces that have marginalized you.

Our generation, the generation who, in all honesty, doesn't even care about the games you and your Democratic friends play in D.C., has grown up on the tail end of this comfortable collaboration, and in its breakdown, we see you for what you are — fake capitalists, fake traditionalists, fake parliamentarians, playing the game by somebody else's rules.

You like to use statistics to justify your weakness, to claim that circumstances have forced you into your milquetoast persona, that the electorate has simply changed and there's nothing you can do about it. This is the logic of unimaginative losers. Ask yourself this: if just a half century ago, so many facets common in American life today were unthinkable, how did things come to be this way? How was that former status quo so thoroughly defeated when the people ratified it, when Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy's voters supported it? The answer, of course, is that the current postmodern liberal regime took the initiative in the struggle, a concept you don't seem to at all grasp. They went out and set the terms of the debate, so that they now can basically shut down any argument in the mainstream by smearing opponents of the status quo as "fringe extremists". You ask for pity within that system, rather than calling it out boldly and directly, and taking back the initiative in the wake of the myriad of social failures surrounding us.

Our generation experiences this unimaginative passivity on your part quite acutely, because, although most of us supported Obama, none of us would claim to be entirely satisfied with him, and with every scandal and failure we seek an alternative all the more. This is where you would naturally enter the picture, but instead of responding to the collapse of corrupted mainstream institutions by funding and building true alternative networks, you instead continue with the same autistic policy arguments that always end in a dead end, and a de facto victory for your political enemies. You get terribly inflamed at the prospect of new gun legislation, but are content to live with all the slow, subtle poisons in the body politic that are actually bringing us down. I suppose I could thank you for protecting my 2nd Amendment rights, to the extent that you have, but I would have preferred it if you had instead focused your efforts on, say, developing a real educational experience for young people who have been taught nothing about history and the true struggle of freedom and tyranny within it. I would feel much safer living in a country where people were intellectually equipped with knowledge of how tyrannies have been historically rationalized, rather than one in which I still have my little pistol to defend myself against militarized government drones supported by an ignorant, apathetic populace.

We would want to look to you, and with every failure you claim to be reaching out to us, and yet our paths never cross. Perhaps it is purely generational, but not in a trivial, pop culture sense. You and your generation of conservative leaders have always operated like freedom can be taken for granted, like no matter how much ground you lose, you will still wake up in Norman Rockwell's America. Your talk shows remain just that — talk shows, the venting of old men that amounts to nothing. You've become the angry, irrelevant caricature the media presents you as, and you have nobody to blame but yourselves. Our generation, on the other hand, cannot afford this decadent complacency, as we will not have the pension and Social Security structures you enjoy as a consequence of your support of this corrupt system, nay, we do not even a five year plan for our futures. While our own country crumbles, you spend the last bits of your wasted capital on counterproductive wars abroad our generation finds totally irrelevant to our own crisis and profoundly immoral. You have failed all of us who are even semi-aware, with your blind respect for the college credentials of institutions that decidedly want you to cease to exist. Upon maturity, we have had to realize the enormity of your default. A sizable percentage of us aren't interested in the Hollywood swill you assume we follow, yet you only approach us on those terms, as if we belong to some kind of solidified new culture beyond your understanding. In truth, we often use our technologies retrospectively — to learn of times, places, and people better than those currently in our midst, and your brand of tepid freedom fighting has not well weathered the comparison.

I may be somewhat an exception from my generation, precisely due to a heavy exposure to stronger historical influences, but I am not alone. Most of my peers would readily admit that they have learned more from Google than they have from school. There is a gaping cultural vacuum, and if you were at all astute, you would be sensitive to it, to the hunger for truth and realism in the face of the failed fantasies of the center-left consensus, and you would capitalize on it. However, history suggests that you won't, that in a time when a large percentage of the American people have realized that our politics is a stale monologue read on a teleprompter, you will keep playing the game in that mold, you will continue to cede the initiative to the likes of CNN and the NYT, whose censure you so fear.

I was quite glad when Obama won a second term, not because I like him, but because in order for this bad post-war political drama to come to a close, the fake opposition must be totally discredited. Your empty words and protestations of struggle no longer mean anything to us, no more than a rap beef, or a professional wrestling match. There is little evidence in your recent history for anybody under the age of 35 to believe that you are anything more than the controlled opposition in an equally fake progressive paradigm, which uses the distractions of media campaigns and fad consciousness to mask a government run for and by corporations. That paradigm is cracking at the seams with every Obama failure, but you are in no position to provide leadership, because on every issue, from government surveillance to bank bailouts, you have either gone along with our current trajectory of diminishing freedom, or voiced your opposition in a self-defeating, apologetic manner. We won't get involved with you because you don't inspire us with a vision of a better world. We will only really show up, in spirit or at the poll, when you start treating freedom as more than a marketing phrase.

COMMENTS

ThoughtHydra says:28 Oct 2013 22:41 EDT

Well said Simon

concerned other says:06 Sep 2013 11:27 EDT

Yet you have operated for decades within the paradigm of a perpetually growing Keynesian state, wherein all crucial sectors of society are dependent on government subsidy, and you never challenged it in principle. You went along with the program, offering only weak caveats within that status quo as an electoral alternative. Now that we have reached the point where the government can't fund itself a year in advance, you want to pin all the blame on President Obama, as if he were a sole nefarious figure operating in isolation, and not the logical culmination of a trend you feebly opposed, nay, emulated, every single step of the way.Wow, just wow. Very succinct description of how sleaz balls like Bill O'Reilly scam sheeple into believing that only the current administration is to blame for our problems; they fail to ever discuss the dry rot of our system that has been taking place for forty years. And yet I feel like people like O'Reilly and Hannity know who they will infuriate and who they are pandering to with every word that comes out of their mouth. Cold, Calculated, cunning. Always making highly politicized statements that can't be retorted against. Support our troops! Lower the debt! How can you argue with that? And yet where are your tangible solutions you useless cultmen?

Anonymous says:05 Sep 2013 9:45 EDT

Our generation started the phase "generation gap". I blamed my parents until I became one. Then, it is all you can do to keep things from changing too fast. Technology may seem wise, but it is inhumane while humanly imperfect. If you live well and prosper, you live most of your life over 35. Blaming is a human failure that makes one feel good for just a moment.Besides dropping the afirmative sexual slur for emphasis, what do you suggest we do, "oh wise one beyond your years?"

rufous says:03 Sep 2013 20:14 EDT

Awesome, positive read on the situation. The majority of the "Republican Base" could care less if these liars shrivel up and die. This is the way their world ends "not with a bang but a whimper".

Any Non Mouse says:03 Sep 2013 14:58 EDT

Panem et circenses.

Welcome to the party ;)

Many of us are old enough to be your parents, but came to the exact same realizations as you - twenty or thirty years ago.

There aren't two sides fighting against each other. Maybe there was at some point - perhaps at the founding of the country - but certainly not for the last hundred and fifty or so years...

Most of us live our lives day by day and just want to be left alone. We have no desire to fuck with the lives of others, and we don't want others fucking around with us. However, there is a small minorty who believes in their heart of hearts that they truly know better how everyone else should be spending their lives, their time, and their money. They long to be considered influential by history and their greatest fear is to be considered irrelevant.

This group doesn't fight us, or each other - they fight reality. They fight the reality that human beings can only be controlled to a point and after that, like water, we will just form a path around barriers no matter how high or how wide. And with that realization, every day that passes finds them less influential and more irrelevant. Hence, they are cornered and afraid and running out of options.

And no animal is more dangerous than a frightened one pushed into a corner with nothing left to lose.